Light patterns

In any time light has often been used in architecture just as building materials, in order to obtain visual and ornamental effects, essential to define the planned space. For this purpose, paradoxically, light should be materialized, it should be perceived as a part of the building essential for its identity. The controlled use of light implies a profound knowledge of it: it is necessary to specify in advance its origin and to control it, to canalise it as it were water, to guide it towards the chosen direction, to calculate its reflections on the surfaces it is going to reach, the interferences with the other sources, its ability to be articulated and to vibrate into the colour, its incidence on building materials which, through its rays, will either fully reveal their characteristics or loose them and acquire new ones. In this sense, the use of light effects has revealed, since the most ancient times, a surprising knowledge of the movement of the sun, as well as a great sensitiveness in the use of the perennial metamorphoses of lights and shadows, and it is one of the architectural archetypes which, through centuries of history and culture, would be re-proposed all over the world until the present time